One drawback of building a huge social-networking community like Facebook is the intensity of that community when it gets mad at management. At the popular networking site, that anger — over what some users perceive to be an erosion of their privacy — is bubbling up in very public ways.
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For example, four New York University computer-science students are attempting to build a social-networking site that would value user privacy more highly than they believe Facebook does. In late April, they set themselves a minimum goal of raising $10,000, to pay for basic living expenses while they wrote code. They were able to raise that amount from online donors in 12 days. Within three weeks, as of Monday, they had raised nearly $175,000 from about 4,600 donors.
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‘How Do I …?’
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The open-source, free software they are developing is called Diaspora. We’re going to build a great lightweight decentralized social-networking framework, write the four on their web site, joindiaspora.com. They added that they’ve also received offers of help from a massive number of talented and experienced people.
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There have also been publicized efforts by some users to delete their Facebook accounts and encourage others to do so. Web tech pundit Leo Laporte, for instance, has made public his efforts to delete his account — and the convoluted efforts required to do so. Others have similarly publicized their attempts to quit Facebook, such as Google’s search spam expert Matt Cutts and Engadget cofounder Peter Rojas. The effort has gathered enough interest that, on Google, entering How do I leads to How do I delete my Facebook account as the first auto-complete suggestion.
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In a recent question-and-answer article with Facebook users in The New York Times, Facebook Vice President for Public Policy Elliot Schrage said we don’t share your information with advertisers. He added that the…